St James Priory

Founded in 1129 as a Benedictine monastery, St James Priory is Bristol’s oldest building with one of the best surviving stone oculus (circular windows) in the country. The building has suffered considerable structural movement through its life and Momentum studied the movements and stresses in the building fabric and deemed the current condition to be stable, so long as further movement is prevented.

Our structural conservation work primarily focused on making improvements to foundations, repair and strengthening of the roof structure, parapet repairs, crack stitching and timber engineering. Further design work was also required to prove the acceptability of alterations which had previously been undertaken to the north aisle arches. This required detailed calculations using both catenary models and finite element analysis.